Let's Terraform: MARS

It's not just you or Terraforming Mars. The more I play online, the more I notice how the medium makes people play in this unnatural, dickish manner of which I'm guilty of.

Here's something I've realized: Many people don't want to have a competitive game. What they want is to win or do well and the easiest way to do that is to quit when losing and starting a game anew. Why stick around when you made a mistake when you can start another game in just a second and not have to deal with it?

Regarding win ratios, they make sense to me. Helion is the most reliable Corp. It doesn't have the potential for greatness but it always work and actively pushes you towards terraforming, which is what wins you the game. It's the best corp for inexperienced players so it would be logical for it to have the highest win ratio.

mezike wrote: Something else that has happened for us a few times is that one side gains what looks like a burst of unassailable advantage to the point that the other felt like quitting, but then the situation would turn around in the late game and reverse the balance of power.

When I first started playing I used to feel that way. But later on I found the advantages aren't that great. Since the game has a mostly fixed endpoint, economy cards tend to be plain "pay X to get X+Y" exchanges.

RobertB wrote: Also, since it's floated to the top, we can kick the Steam version around a little more.

Talking about rushing the ending vs. playing engines, you don't see many people on Steam push TR.

Win percentages there are Helion > Tharsis > everybody else.

The past few times I've played online, I've seen a lot of dropped games and players who just wandered away from the keyboard. Maybe it's because I'm an asshole, but I'm not sure how they found out, because I don't talk to anyone. Perhaps I just exude it at some subquantum level. Actually, I think the keyboard wanderers are just trying to keep from taking the karma hit, because the only player who takes the karma hit is the player that forfeits first, Players 2+ who forfeit take the L, but don't take the karma hit. So the wanders just go grab a snack and let the other players lose their patience and forfeit.

It's still an amazingly terrible implementation. It was never tested, at least not to production software standards, and I'm not 100% convinced it was even played by the developers. Since LuckyHammers folded, I wouldn't hop on one foot waiting for it to be improved, expanded, or fixed.

And because of the botched Steam version,no iPad version as of yet. Supposedly Asmodee will fix/finish it in house but like you I am not holding my breath.

Erik Twice wrote: It's not just you or Terraforming Mars. The more I play online, the more I notice how the medium makes people play in this unnatural, dickish manner of which I'm guilty of.

Here's something I've realized: Many people don't want to have a competitive game. What they want is to win or do well and the easiest way to do that is to quit when losing and starting a game anew. Why stick around when you made a mistake when you can start another game in just a second and not have to deal with it?

If this is something inherently different about online gaming, does that mean that there isn't much overlap between people who play boardgames face to face and people who play boardgames online? Or does this difference in format really provoke such different behavior?

I suspect part of it is the tracking of an individual player's win loss ratio or ranking or whatever. Instead of just playing a game for the normal reasons, a player is also now putting his own status at the site at stake. If they took away that kind of tracking, people could relax and maybe just play the damn game instead of worrying so much about winning or losing. I consider it tragic that people could take an inherently fun activity (I'm being nice here, given my usual outlook about VP salad bars) and drain all the fun out of it because of a ratio. Fun-murderers, all of them.

Shellhead wrote:

Erik Twice wrote: It's not just you or Terraforming Mars. The more I play online, the more I notice how the medium makes people play in this unnatural, dickish manner of which I'm guilty of.

Here's something I've realized: Many people don't want to have a competitive game. What they want is to win or do well and the easiest way to do that is to quit when losing and starting a game anew. Why stick around when you made a mistake when you can start another game in just a second and not have to deal with it?

If this is something inherently different about online gaming, does that mean that there isn't much overlap between people who play boardgames face to face and people who play boardgames online? Or does this difference in format really provoke such different behavior?

I suspect part of it is the tracking of an individual player's win loss ratio or ranking or whatever. Instead of just playing a game for the normal reasons, a player is also now putting his own status at the site at stake. If they took away that kind of tracking, people could relax and maybe just play the damn game instead of worrying so much about winning or losing. I consider it tragic that people could take an inherently fun activity (I'm being nice here, given my usual outlook about VP salad bars) and drain all the fun out of it because of a ratio. Fun-murderers, all of them.

Up until recently I hadn't seen a lot of people just abandon the game. And even now I haven't seen any of your typical PvP nonsense. I know the Steam TM karma system sucks ass, but given the game as a whole, that's no real surprise.

An online follow-up: I've played four online games since this Sunday. Of the four, one of the other players abandoned (not forfeited) the game in three of them. In effect, the game is locked up for however long it takes for the player to time out. These games are in total silence; maybe a 'gl' at the start.

At this point, unless you love the solo game, I wouldn't recommend the online. Its AI sucks too badly to give you a good game, and the online game's problems will not be fixed.

Question: how long does everyone (physical not online) games last and at what player counts? We had a casual, drinking, many smoke breaks three player game last night that may have lasted... five hours? What is the typical game time.?

That sounds awful. I've played in 5 player games the last 3 times out, and e en with new people at the table, games were less than 2 hours. Someone, or almost of you, must really like to explain their turns to everyone or you have 3 too many analysis/paralysis guys at the table.

I should say from set up to put away with new players. And yes, everyone explained their turns and it was actually more like four... and as awful as it sounds, it was actually a really good time until the last 15 mins (totaling up buzzed was a chore lol)

WadeMonnig wrote: Question: how long does everyone (physical not online) games last and at what player counts? We had a casual, drinking, many smoke breaks three player game last night that may have lasted... five hours? What is the typical game time.?

Hour and a half. The game should be over between generations 9 to 11, perhaps 12.

3-4 players, 2 hours. Five hours I’d gouge my eyes out.

2 hours is about right. Prelude will shorten it by a little bit. Venus and Colonies can make it run longer, because it can make point engines run a little better.

Another note, now that I am actually awake. Like a lot of games, TM's playing time is affected by whatever style your players like to play. If everyone likes to increase parameters for TR then your game will be less than two hours. If everyone likes to draw cards and score VP it can get close to three hours, even if nobody is playing particularly slowly.

Terraforming Mars: Turmoil. We picked this up recently and have had our first few games with it added in to the mix. First of all, if you dislike the complexity added in to the game by Colonies then you will hate, hate, hate what Turmoil does as it is definitely the most complex expansion to date. Taken individually however this adds interesting variety to the game by adding some disruptive elements. TM is a game of subtle incremental changes and micro-transactions; the included events and the impact of the politics of the ruling party change things just enough to throw some of those step-changes out of balance. As a very broad example, forcing the “Reds” party into power when an opponent is generating lots of plants is a real kick in the teeth as it then forces them to pay for every terraforming point that they earn, but then again if they instead manage to finagle the “Greens” into rule they will earn money with every forest played and hit the accelerator on their strategy. You cannot ignore the political battle going on in the background, especially because the game is filling up the committee with neutral delegates who will change the balance of power in random and unfortunate ways if you do not take charge.

Being quick to deploy your own delegates can force the agenda in a favourable direction. In one of our games I had a corp which represents a shadowy conspirational organisation that rewards putting delegates into play. As I was focusing so much on this it meant that I was deeply involved in manipulating the state of political power and it gave a good grounding in understanding just how valuable this can be when you get just the right party into power at the most appropriate time. There is also an instant reward to doing this in that having leading influence in multiple parties and taking over chairmanship of the committee provides instant payback and builds ‘Influence’ which mitigates penalties and maximises rewards on the event cards.

A new step is introduced each round where all players lose a Terraforming Point each round and along with the events this does enough to slow down and interfere with plans to make an investment in politics very much worthwhile as well as putting some small constraint on runaway TP/cash strategies that were previously very difficult to play against. The fact that players have the agency to influence the impact of the elements included in this expansion and have the impetus to compete for control makes this so much more enjoyable and tactically taxing than simply introducing random event cards to the mix. It creates another opportunity-cost moment where you open each generation with even more things that you want to be the first to jump onto and this helps support the tension of the battle of wills that often happens at the start and end of every generation. Many of the new inclusions leverage tags which also balances some of the Prelude cards in interesting ways when figuring out your overall strategy in the opening stage, so Turnoil is also successful in tying the game together by having an effect throughout the entirety of the game from start to finish and integrates neatly into previous expansion content.

I would actually rank this as my second favourite TM expansion after Prelude. I love what it does to the game but also acknowledge that enjoying it requires you to go pretty deep down into the TM rabbit hole so really not for everyone. The double layer player mats are also great – I’ve never had a problem with spilling tokens but I do love using these, they look so much nicer than the original mats and have a rewarding tactile feel when putting resources into the little troughs. The new cards add new stuff which is fine, the more content that goes into the game the less your strategy tends to rest on card draws so a bigger more diluted and streaky deck makes no real difference. We played a game earlier today and I won by some margin with roughly only a dozen cards in play at the end, on a number of occasions deciding not to take any new cards into hand along the way as I had more interesting things to spend the money on. It’s great that there are more opportunities to build a successful strategy without needing to rely on card draws. I’m very happy with Turmoil, but I would dread ever having to teach all of this to someone new to the game.

Interesting. There are two copies of this at the local used bookstore and I keep thinking about picking it up because of good reviews here (I know some people hate it) so updates are helpful.

Honestly, I don't know the game, but your description makes this expansion sound like one of these "advanced" expansions that greatly complexify or change the nature of the game. I recently bought the Roll for the Galaxy one of these which is great if you've played the base game w/first expansion 50 times like I have.

Yes, I’d Agree with that summary. One could probably make an interesting game out of just the base game and Turmoil. The parliamentary mini-game allows players to manipulate the benefits of standard actions and some card plays so it does effectively change how the base game works. I expect that it would be beneficial to first have a good understanding of how everything interacts and how to pull the various levers in the game to avoid a chaotic mess.